This paper studies racial and ethnic discrimination in discrete choices by real estate brokers using national audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study. It uses a fixed effects logit model to estimate the probability that discrimination occurs and to study the causes of...

The author constructs a theoretical model to examine the effects of an inherent conflict of interest between a seller of a house and the real estate broker hired by the seller. The model is then used to calibrate the broker's commission rates that would maximize the seller's expected gain. The...

Previous research (Rutherford et al., 2005; Levitt and Syverson, 2005) identify and quantify agency problems in the brokerage of single-family houses. Real estate agents are found to receive a premium when sellling their own houses in comparison to similar client-owned houses. Given the homogeneity...

Real estate agents typically receive commissions based on a fixed percentage of home price purchases. Because housing prices vary across markets, one might expect that realtors have higher earnings in high-priced markets. Prior work by Hsieh and Moretti (2003) suggests that entry among realtors...

We study the effect on economic outcomes resulting from reputation in a market and related locational advantage of intermediaries through the lens of brokered transactions in the commercial real estate market. Specifically, we explore how the locational advantage generated by a reputation for...

Despite the prevalence and high cost of real estate agents, there is limited empirical evidence as to the nature or efficacy of their services. In this paper we estimate real estate agents' value-added when either selling or buying homes using data from three large multiple listing services...

Despite the popular emergence of online property brokerage platforms in the second-hand housing market, little is known about whether and how these platforms would influence the market, especially in terms of housing price. We thus assemble and analyze data from multiple sources about the entry...